October 2004 Archives
Back at Halley, briefly (we hope!)
Dear Granny,
Thankyou so much for your last two letters that I haven't yet responded to – one of October 15/16th and the next, which I just received today, from the 23rd. I hope you received the flowers in place of my usual letters.
I am writing this on a Wednesday having taken a last-minute detour back to base this afternoon on our way to our second campsite of the holiday. Simon, Craig, Ed and I left for the "MacDonald Ice Rumples" on Sunday afternoon and had intended on staying away until next Sunday – hence I wasn't sure if you would get any letters from me this week. We had a fantastic time at the Rumples – what an amazing place.
As you know, everything around Halley is flat, flat, flat except for a few features you can see on the horizon. One of these is the Rumples and since they're the only thing you can see, I thought they would be huge. As it turns out, it's pretty impressive but just lots of lumpy bumpy upturned icebergs, not much higher than the ice-shelf itself. And only an hour skidoo ride away! Apparently this is a point where the continental shelf is higher (like a mountain underwater) and grounds the moving ice shelf that we live on. The result is all sorts of chaos and the nice smooth ice breaking up and forming creeks... it is, in fact, the reason why we can access the base by ship every year.
Anyway, what you actually see is delightful, to my eyes anyway. Lots of ice, massive massive ice cubes, open water (the sea, the sea!), icebergs in the distance, grounded icebergs frozen in around us... very exciting, you can almost see the ground moving around you (very slowly!) We even saw some footsteps that colleagues made last week and this week they were seperated by a 3 foot gap where the ice had moved (so we turned around at that point instead of jumping!) Here's a picture:
Just these few days away have done wonders for my confidence as well – confidence camping in the antarctic, putting up and taking down tents, abseiling, walking in crevassed ice fields... when you know how, it doesn't feel very scary at all!
Anyway, last night we decided to make the most of our 10 days off and head for the Hinge Zone today if the weather was good. That's the place I went in March but didn't see anything because the weather was so bad. After about an hour of driving, we stopped to check everyone was ok and discovered that (1) there were some possibly nasty clouds looming and (2) one of our team had quite bad frostnip on his neck. We were still fairly close to base so we decided to come home, have a cup of tea and re-assess here after having warmed up. Hence this opportunity to email!
The timing is actually pretty good as it's a friend's birthday today as well so everyone is in a celebratory mood. I think we'll spend the night here tonight and then try to move on somewhere tomorrow. If the weather's too bad to go to the Hinge Zone (about 4-5 hours driving), then we might just go to the caboose on the coast and visit the penguins again. There are apparently even more now than at my last visit! So whatever we do, I know we'll have a good time. It would be nice to get to the Hinge though as this is probably my last chance to see it. Never mind if not – I have after all seen lots here and had an amazing year!
On other news, we are apparently due to have three or four flights in the next month, which is a bit weird. One private plane will be flying between Rothera and a Russian station and refuelling at Halley... and then apparently returning a few days later and possibly then a third time, we don't really know for sure though. After that come the Germans on their way to Neumayer – I met them the last two years and they're always fun to have around for a few days. I don't think the intention is ever to stay long but you really can't predict anything with the weather here as you've probably gathered by now!
Then, finally, in December we might get visitors from our own institution along with mail and fresh food (the Germans should hopefully bring some goodies but again, we've been told not to count on it!) There will be a couple more flights in December carrying new faces (one lot coming in via Cape Town, the South African base and then the German base... lucky sods!) The real chaos of course starts when the ship arrives around Christmas... I can't belive that this will then be the third time I'll be documenting that time of year! It really must be time to move on!
The sun is now almost permanently up, I'm not really sure because we've had so much cloud cover lately. It's certainly light outside the whole time.. makes camping easy and allows for late starts after bumbly mornings, always useful! The warmer weather also makes an incredible difference to the basic enjoyment and ease of getting anything done. On my last camping trip I remember my face getting so cold, goggles steaming up, fingers feeling sore after a few minutes outside big mitts.. and just tying knots, lashing sledges, doing anything really was hindered by either cold or darkness. Plus, of course, it's much nicer sleeping when you're warm even if it's light!
So, I'm coming around to the advantages of warmth and light though wouldn't have missed the winter for the world.. it's still nice to know that Scorpio is up there even if I can't see him!
I've just re-read this and realised that much that I've written to you I'd probably repeat to Felix to put on his webpage. If you don't mind, I'll send this to him as well and he can maybe post it for a dfferent angle of my life here (weekly letters to Granny are actually big events for me!).
I'll write with more news as soon as I get back from wherever I'm going!
lots and lots of love
Rhian
Posted by Rhian at 12:55 EST | Comments (2)
Midnight light
When I first came here, I was mesmerised by continual light, the midnight sun, the beauty of the ice at all times of day and day. I couldn't understand why both blinds and curtains were firmly closed in evenings at the bar: I didn't come here to be reminded of evenings in Anybar, Anywhere. I wasn't alone peeking behind the curtains, cooing at the light, wishing I could spend my every minute Out There but having run out of Things To Do. It is still cold in the summer, though not unpleasantly, and it is still flat here, so there are only so many ways you can spend your time outside. At the very least I wanted to be able to look at the icescape through the window. I didn't want to watch yet another movie, drink yet another beer, talk more shite, all these things that I could do at home.
The tables have turned now, I want the light blocked out in the evenings, I enjoy watching films here that I know I would never see at home, I continually talk shite, and listen to it, on subjects that I might have walked away from hours earlier previously. What's the hurry? Is there somewhere better to go?! Yes, I'm doing some things I might never have tried at home: painting, developing photos, playing guitar, making a frame, baking, reading a german book - even cross-stiching (!yes! you read it right). But I also watch almost every film that is shown, from Ben Hur to Flash Gordon, and every series from 24 to Band of Brothers. Watching television and going to films isn't something I do much of at home. There was (arrogantly) always something 'more worthwhile' to do. Here, as I said, why not? An intrinsic part of spending a winter here is learning to spend time indoors, becoming comfortable with enforced inactivity, watching those films you've never seen before. I have become much more comfortable with myself, with doing nothing. The guilt associated with 'time-wasting' has gone. It's lovely!
Anyway, we now have permanent light even if the sun isn't permanently risen. It will be soon. In the evenings, you can lose all track of time, during work or play, since it's continually bright. And when it's bright, the body thinks it should be Doing Stuff. Watching a film or reading a book with the curtains open means it feels like the middle of the day even at 10pm. Evenings do not feel like evenings unless it's dark. Plus, we enjoyed the dark, we liked the hibernation, the slowing down and unwinding. The sense of no hurry. Closing the blinds, drawing the curtains, it blocks the summer out. In a couple of months I'll be one of those winterers who closes the curtains despite the beauty outside and though I don't entirely understand why, I now understand why they did it to me.
I'm writing during yet another snowy white can't-see-anything day but I'm happy as we've had a few days reprieve. For almost a week, we could see to the horizon, saw blue sky and contrast in the snow and enjoyed evening sun. Last Sunday I went on a trip to the penguins, and a couple of nights ago I learnt to kite-ski, flying around the base. On another evening, I went for a long walk with a friend around the perimeter at 1am. I had forgotten how beautiful, and how much fun, Halley is in the summer. Finally, finally, I have realised that the next stage will be good too.
Posted by Rhian at 12:55 EST | Comments (5)
Julie Taymor's Magic Flute
Julie Taymor's new production of Die Zauberflöte at the Met is an unqualified triumph. My guess is that it will last at least as long as the David Hockney production it replaces (14 years), and might, conceivably, even outlast The Lion King on Broadway. Some reviewers seem to hope that it will serve as the ideal jumping-off point for the millions of New Yorkers who have never been to an opera before; my only worry is that it will spoil such people for the much more boring productions they're bound to go see if they do catch the opera bug. Either way, this is certainly the best production of Zauberflöte that I've ever seen, and although there have been countless others over the past 200 years, I'm sure that it's one of the best ever, anywhere.
The wonder and the curse of Zauberflöte is that it's an utterly magical opera, makes very little sense, and simply can't be "played straight". If the design team got the loudest ovations at the premiere on Friday, that was partly because of their magnificent achievement, but also because it makes no sense to criticise them from departing from the "normal" way of doing things. With this opera, more than any other, you can't just hire Franco Zeffirelli to put on a lavish and utterly unimaginative production: it requires colour, imagination, and inventiveness.
In the past, the Met has tackled this problem by hiring visually stunning artists, like Hockney and Marc Chagall, to design striking sets for the opera. In choosing Julie Taymor to direct it, however, they've tacked a little: she's credited for costume design, puppet design and overall production, but it's her colleague George Tsypin who gets credit for the sets. The result is a much less static opera than Zauberflöte normally is: there's nearly always movement on stage, something to surprise and delight the audience even after their initial awe at the staging has worn off. The moments which stick in the visual memory are not the bits when the curtain rises, so much as individual scenes: dancing bears, or Papageno's puppet-feast, or the grand entrance, on a revolve, of the Queen of the Night.
Moreover, for all its unprecedented theatrical innovation, Taymor's production is actually very conservative when it comes to what really matters – the music. The overture is played from beginning to end with the curtain down and nothing happening on stage at all, and when a cast member is singing, he or she is always standing up, facing the audience, with nothing interfering with our ability to enjoy their work. There are a few scrims in this production (regular readers of this blog might recall that scrims are something of a pet peeve of mine), but they're used rarely, and never in between a singer and the audience. No one is asked to sing while lying down, or sitting down, or hanging upside-down from a trapeze, or even to navigate a precarious rake. The whole production fits neatly inside the proscenium: Taymor is confident enough of her theatrical abilities that she doesn't see any need to break the rules for effect.
I have to say, then, that I'm extremely puzzled at the extremely curmudgeonly review that Tony Tommasini gave the production in the New York Times."Ms. Taymor's production is so packed with stage tricks, so peopled with puppets, kite-flyers, dancers and extras of sundry description," he says, "that the exceptionally fine musical performance given by the conductor James Levine and a strong cast was overwhelmed". Tommasini goes on to give specific examples: armed guards are "rendered irrelevant" by puppets; Tamino "looked distracted, as if trying to remember and execute a predetermined pattern of stylized poses"; other puppets have the unfortunate effect of preventing us from "pondering Papageno's romantic dilemma".
I'm sure that if Die Zauberflöte is presented in concert performance, that might help the audience concentrate a bit more on the music. But the whole point of opera as an artform is that it is the confluence of music and theatre; Taymor's Zauberflöte simply constitutes theater just as magical as the music.
I really don't understand Tommasini's point at all: of all the operas in the world, Zauberflöte is one of the least fragile. To put it mildly, this particular opera isn't exactly famous for its piercing psychological insights: the libretto makes no sense at all, even by operatic standards, and the number one reason to go see it is simply to listen to a large chunk of the most beautiful music ever written. Now I didn't go to the exact same performance that Tommasini did (I went last night, to the second performance), but I vividly remember that scene with the armed guards where he says they "might as well have been performing from the orchestra pit". And I can distinctly remember what I was thinking as I watched that scene: that the staging was hugely impressive, that the music was gorgeous, and that – foremost – the singing was some of the best in the opera.
In Zauberflöte of all operas, there's really no need for the singers to be the most important thing on the stage, visually speaking. Tommasini does have a shadow of a point when he talks about the costumes: they weren't really up to the standard of the staging or the puppets, but that didn't really matter because the voices were so good. I'd say it was an excellent ensemble cast: no one really stood out, but everybody sang their parts with accuracy and feeling. There's no doubt who the audience favourite was, though: the spirit-guide boy trebles, who were perfectly in tune and in time with each other.
Julie Taymor, with this prodution, has finally taken the weight of the story off the shoulders of the singers – and for that we should be grateful rather than aggrieved. "It's my job to make the libretto and the staging magical," she seems to be telling her singers: "your job is to do the same for the music". And, under the masterful direction of James Levine, that's exactly what they did.
I had the most wonderful night at the opera last night, thanks to a cast and crew of hundreds. Of all the people who contributed to the evening's success, Taymor, though crucial, was only the third most important. Levine was number two: he absolutely nailed the score, and reminded me that the Met's band is still one of the top five orchestras in the world. Number one, of course, was, and is, and ever shall be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Taymor did what she does best, without interfering with either Levine or Mozart, and that is probably her greatest achievement of all. And with all due respect to Tony Tommasini, anybody who thinks that Mozart's score can't stand up to a couple of puppets is in dire need of an injection of general musical enthusiasm.
Then again, I fear that Tommasini might not have been alone. Yet again, I came away sorely disappointed in the quality of the Met's audience, which seemed to be comprised last night mainly of a large contingent from the Upper West Side Hospital for Acute Bronchial Disorders. Given that the average age seemed to be somewhere north of 70, you'd think that they'd've worked out by now that the overture is actually part of the opera, and that when the orchestra is playing music, it might be a good idea to discontinue their conversations. But maybe this is what happens when you bring Julie Taymor to the Met: you get people who think that if they can talk and cough in The Lion King, they can talk and cough in Zauberflöte. Idiots.
Posted by Felix at 15:18 EST | Comments (5)
Where does new music belong?
When I was 16, a concert changed my life. I've written about it here before: it was the London Symphony, under Kent Nagano, playing Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. Read my piece from 2002 if you want to know that story; my point here is to say that that one concert was sufficient to get me hooked on new music in general.
In the two or three years following that evening, I actively sought out all the new music I could find. Most of it was played at the Purcell Room in London, one of the most acoustically perfect concert halls in the world, small (and subsidised) enough that adventurous programming was welcomed with open arms. It was there that I learned about all the big names of the post-war classical music world: Boulez, Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, and more relatively unknown British composers than you could shake a stick at. I basically got my classical education by working backwards from these guys: occasionally a Webern piece, say would come up, I'd get into him, and then at the next Webern concert I'd find something even more mainstream, and so on.
Meanwhile, my mother, emboldened by my enthusiastic response to the Messiaen, started educating me on her favourites, especially Bartók. Wonderfully, Sir Georg Solti was still very much alive and active on the London scene, and I went to many concerts he conducted of his beloved fellow Hungarian. To this day, Solti remains the conductor I feel most fondly towards: I can still vividly remember his kindly face, and the blood-quickening sounds he could get out of the LSO once he really got his teeth into something like Mahler's First. There are many conductors I respect, but Solti had a knack of engendering something closer to love – I daresay Leonard Bernstein did something similar in New York.
Solti was one of those conductors who inspires enough devotion among his listeners that they will follow him to pastures new. Simon Rattle is another: when he turned people on to classical music, it wasn't a narrow swathe of Brahms and Beethoven, but a vast range of music from Handel and Monteverdi to Henze and Messiaen, and beyond.
Rattle is one of those conductors – Michael Tilson Thomas, in San Francisco, springs to mind as another – who makes successful attempts to place new music at the heart of any concert season. Such people are rare, however, and the example of Nicholas Kenyon, who always throws an enormous quantity of new music into any Proms season, only really goes to show what is possible when you're supported by Auntie Beeb rather than octogenarian subscribers who start getting nervous when they see Richard Strauss on the bill.
A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto Symphony caused a small stir in classical music circles when they announced, in the words of Greg Sandow, that "they're going to banish new music from their regular season, at least for this year, and stick it off by itself in a few concerts next spring". (I can't link to the original story, because it's behind a subscriber firewall, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of press release on the official Toronto Symphony website.) Sandow, along with Alex Ross, refused to condemn this action: if new music isn't working in what Ross calls a "ghastly ritual, generating reams of five- and twenty-minute pieces that serve no vital function", then why not try an alternative method of delivering it?
While I understand where Sandow and Ross are coming from, I fear the Toronto experiment is doomed to failure. Full-scale symphony orchestras are expensive animals, and new-music concerts aimed at under-30 members coaxed with $10 tickets are guaranteed to lose large amounts of money. The minute that the orchestra runs into budget difficulties (and there isn't an orchestra in the world which doesn't run into budget difficulties), the new-music concerts will be the first to go. New music simply doesn't work as a bolted-on afterthought: it has to be an integral part of what an orchestra does, or it is nothing.
One way of doing this, of course, is for an orchestra to specialise in new music. The experience of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is disheartening, but a look across the pond at the London Sinfonietta shows that it is possible to run a successful, high-profile orchestra with consistently interesting and daring programming.
In the US, the prime example, although of course it is not an orchestra and therefore doesn't have nearly the same kind of struggles with overhead costs, is the Kronos Quartet. I went to see them perform Terry Riley's Sun Rings at BAM last night, and it was quite a sight to behold, even before the performance started. The large opera house was completely sold out, even though there were three separate performances featuring nothing but this single piece by a composer who's mainly known for one work he wrote in 1964.
Clearly, there's a huge audience for new music if it's done right. And the main lesson of last night's concert, for me, was that the audience really has to be able to trust the performers. A couple of posts ago, I worried about going to see a new opera at Glyndebourne: evidently, I don't completely trust the house to put on a great show. And the Death of Klinghoffer fiasco last December was proof enough for anybody that the Brooklyn Philharmonic and BAM are not the kind of brand names which can be trusted with new music.
The Kronos Quartet, however, with more than 30 years of history, has managed to create a brand name which people know they can trust. The score for Sun Rings did not require particularly virtuoso playing: probably there are a dozen other quartets who could have sat in those chairs and done an equally good job. But the production here was immaculate: no costs were cut, the very best designers and singers were hired, and everybody worked with each other to create a whole which was greater than the sum of its parts – quite the opposite of the regrettable Klinghoffer situation.
I'm not going to say much about Sun Rings itself: while I greatly enjoyed the concert, and am extremely glad I went, I have serious misgivings about the final movement, with visuals straight out of the annual report of a major multinational polluter and an annoying woman's voice intoning something about One Earth One People One Love. Other than that, the piece is excellent, and the video footage of the surface of the sun, especially, was glorious.
My broader point is that the audience clearly had a great experience last night, and, if given the choice, most of them will come back for more. There are many wonderful works written for full orchestra rather than for string quartet which could get a similar reaction. What New York lacks – what, I daresay, America lacks – is an institution which has successfully invested itself in performing those pieces. The problem, as I see it, with the Toronto approach is that if it doesn't work, little if any harm is done to the orchestra as a whole. New music is hard work, and if the costs of failure are low or even negative, then no one's going to expend much effort in making sure it works. The Kronos Quartet managed to sell out BAM for three successive nights because their audience knows that they care about new music, and have a history of getting it right. There are precious few other US organisations about whom the same can be said.
Posted by Felix at 16:48 EST | Comments (2)
Cheney's $80 billion: The facts
Normally, this is a place for me to rant about stuff which I might care about, but can't really claim to be any kind of an expert on. I'm breaking with tradition here, however, to pick on Dick Cheney for one thing he said in tonight's vice-presidential debate. This from the transcript:
EDWARDS: You know, we've taken 90 percent of the coalition causalities. American taxpayers have borne 90 percent of the costs of the effort in Iraq.
And we see the result of there not being a coalition: The first Gulf war cost America $5 billion. We're at $200 billion and counting.
IFILL: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds to respond.
CHENEY: Well, Gwen, the 90 percent figure is just dead wrong. When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they‘ve taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent.
With respect to the cost, it wasn't $200 billion. You probably weren't there to vote for that. But $120 billion is, in fact, what has been allocated to Iraq. The rest of it's for Afghanistan and the global war on terror.
The allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion by one estimate. That, plus $14 billion they promised in terms of direct aid, puts the overall allied contribution financially at about $95 billion, not to the $120 billion we've got, but, you know, better than 40 percent. So your facts are just wrong, Senator.
Now it just so happens that the one thing I really do know about is Iraq's sovereign debt: I just wrote a 6,600-word cover story on the subject for the September issue of Euromoney. But before I get to the debt, let's just see what Cheney is doing here. When he says, for instance, that "The 90 percent figure is just dead wrong", he's simply lying. Quite clearly, according to the transcript, Edwards talked about "the coalition casualties". Only by including the Iraqi casualties can Cheney bring that number down – and, frankly, I'm surprised he wants to go there, given the enormous number of Iraqi civilian casualties that the US has caused.
Cheney then points out, correctly, that the cost of the war in Iraq so far is $120 billion, not $200 billion. On the other hand, the total projected cost of the war in Iraq has actually reached $200 billion. You pays yer billions and you takes yer choice, I suppose. Cheney then decides to compare the $120 billion figure with $95 billion that he says "the allies" are giving as their "overall contribution". And that's where he starts moving into the realm of complete and utter fantasy.
Cheney's $14 billion figure I have no idea about: it's not footnoted on the official Bush-Cheney debate facts page, and I haven't been able to Google it. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. But the $80 billion figure is just crazy. Here are the facts.
Firstly, "the allies", as that term is generally understood, can't possibly reduce Iraq's debt by "nearly $80 billion", because they don't even have that much in Iraqi debt. The US is owed about $4.4 billion, the UK is owed less than $2 billion, and all of eastern Europe combined is owed maybe $6 billion – mostly to countries like Bulgaria, who weren't part of the coalition in the first place.
Secondly, no one's "stepped forward and agreed" anything. Some of Iraq's major creditors, including France and Russia, have paid lip service to the principle of reducing Iraq's debt, promising a "substantial reduction" or suchlike when Iraq goes to the Paris Club of bilateral creditors later this year. In the world of debt restructuring, a "substantial reduction" can mean anything from 35% to 95%. Indeed, if there was any kind of agreement, Cheney wouldn't need to be citing estimates: he could just cite the agreement. But there is none.
Thirdly, there are certainly people out there who think that Iraq's debt will be reduced by $80 billion. But that's all in the future: it hasn't happened yet. Cheney's verb tense ("have agreed") is unambiguous: he's saying this has already happened. It hasn't. The talks haven't even started yet. Even if a Paris Club agreement is concluded by the end of this year (a very big if), the Paris Club in total accounts for less than $42 billion of Iraq's foreign debt. And it doesn't take a former CEO to know that you can't reduce $42 billion of debt by $80 billion.
More broadly, Cheney is comparing apples with oranges. Consider the hypothetical case of a French contractor who built a hospital in Iraq in the 1980s. Iraq was tardy on its payments, and eventually, after the invasion of Kuwait, stopped them entirely. Of the $20 million total cost, let's say only $10 million was paid. Because the contract was supported by French export credit guarantees, the French government took on the debt, paying the contractor itself. Today, with past-due interest, the $10 million that Iraq owed has grown to $20 million. If France agrees to write off 75% of that debt, then, by Cheney's calculus, it's contributing $15 million towards Iraq, $15 million which is entirely comparable (if you're Cheney) to $15 million in real US taxpayer dollars which is being spent by the US government on troops and munitions and reconstruction and the like.
Remember that the $15 million which France may or may not write off is basically little more than an accounting entry. It costs the French taxpayer nothing: it's simply a recognition of the fact, which has been obvious for years, that Iraq is never going to pay its creditors all that they are owed.
Look at it another way: let's say that back in 1984, when interest rates were high, I lent my uncle Ted $100, at 10% interest, for a period of time we both thought wouldn't be much more than a year. He then disappeared entirely: maybe he joined an ashram in India, or something. Whatever: he was impossible to contact, and I mentally gave up hope of ever getting my money back. But then, out of the blue, he turns up one day, saying that he's trying to rectify everything he's ever done in his life, and offering me a crisp $100 bill. By Cheney's calculation, accepting that bill in payment of his debts is functionally equivalent to giving him $573 in cash.
To be sure, the $100 loan has compounded so much over the past 20 years that Ted would need that much extra to pay me past-due interest. But there's no doubt that there's a huge difference between me accepting that $100 bill in payment of his debts, and my cousin Fred lending Ted $500 in brand-new cash. But if my cousin Fred was related to Cheney, he could say something like "well, I might have given Ted $500, but Felix has given him even more: Felix has given him $573". In reality, of course, I never gave Ted anything of the sort, and in fact I never even lent him that much to start with.
I can tell you where Cheney's $80 billion figure comes from. Iraq's total debts come to about $120 billion, the vast majority of which are bilateral. The general consensus among people who know about such things is that by the time everything is worked out, Iraq will receive at least two-thirds forgiveness of its debts – and two thirds of $120 billion is $80 billion.
But bear in mind, here, that somewhere between $55 billion and $70 billion of that $120 billion headline figure is owed to other Arab states, who helped to finance Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. The degree to which that money was grants, rather than loans, has never really been formalised: these things are usually agreed verbally between ministers, and reliable records can be impossible to find. Never mind that these Gulf states certainly don't seem to count as "allies" for the purposes of Cheney's rhetoric: if they simply decide that the money they gave Iraq in the 1980s was, well, money they gave Iraq in the 1980s, and money they don't expect to be repaid, then suddenly "the overall allied contribution" has been bumped up by something north of $50 billion.
In other words, if the Kerry campaign tells you that the US is bearing 90% of the costs in Iraq, and the Bush campaign counters with anything along the lines of what Cheney said today, you can rest assured that the Kerry campaign is right and the Bush campaign is wrong. I'm sure the same is true on many other issues as well, but this is the one I really know about. Any questions about Iraq's sovereign debt – just ask. I'm your man.
Posted by Felix at 1:33 EST | Comments (0)
Dan Flavin
One of the biggest surprises, for myself along with many people, of Dia:Beacon was the fact that Dan Flavin's work looks so marvelous in natural light. So when I heard that the head of Dia, Michael Govan, had curated the new Flavin retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I was looking forward to more surprises and new ways of looking at Flavin.
I must say now that it's a very good retrospective, and if you're anywhere near Washington you should check it out. But it's not a great show, and in fact it might well look much better when it moves on to Fort Worth and Chicago next year.
The show starts off well, at least from the outside of the gallery. The National Gallery of Art does not go in for what James Traub calls "unthinkably garish and self-aggrandizing" banners on the outside of its pristine IM Pei building, but if you approach from the other side of Constitution Avenue, it's easy to see that something interesting is going on inside. The big long North-facing window which helps illuminate the gallery's atrium has been filled with a beautiful green glow, thanks to the installation of Untitled (To You, Heiner, With Admiration and Affection) just inside it. That's it at the top of this post.
But look at the photograph, which comes from the estate of the artist, and anybody who's actually visited the show will notice a couple of things. Firstly, the photo is taken at dusk, when the interplay with natural light is minimised. During the height of the day, it becomes obvious that the Flavin has been placed in the darkest place in the whole atrium, as though the curators didn't have faith that it could actually stand up to untrammeled daylight. There's a big roof above it, extending both inside and outside the window, so the piece is permanently in shadow. While it looks great from the outside, it's less impressive from the inside, shunted off to the edge of the atrium where it has much less ability to really dominate the space.
Flavin was a master at dominating light-infused spaces – think of his twelve-sided tower of pink fluorescent lights rising all the way from the floor to the very top of the Guggenheim spiral in New York. Obviously, he couldn't install something similarly site-specific here: he's been dead since 1996. But Dia has shown how even his early works can be spectacular in a large space, and the rather bland and empty atrium of the National Gallery was crying out for something much more in-your-face. In the exhibition proper, for instance, is an enormous installation of red, white and blue lamps which is somewhat uncomfortably installed in an irregularly-shaped space with a spotlight weirdly shining down from the ceiling. Could that, perhaps, have been moved to the museum lobby?
The other thing worth noticing about the photograph above is the lamps' reflection in the polished museum floor. If you leaf through the catalogue, you'll find that's true of every single piece: a glowing tube, with light reflecting off the wall, the ceiling, if visible, and always the floor. It's part of the work: it's not only all around you, in the way that an Irwin might be, or a Serra; it's also below you, in the manner of an Andre – sometimes you feel as though you're floating in light, and frequently over the course of walking through the exhibition I was reminded of the gallery installations of James Turrell.
But the lobby installation is the odd work out in the National Gallery's show: every other work is exhibited on a dark grey carpet. It's hard to think of a floor surface more ill suited to Dan Flavin, and in fact the show is at its theatrical best when you climb the spiral staircase to the second floor and find yourself entering, head-first, the pure bright light field emitted by Untitled (to Henri Matisse) – four lamps, of pink, yellow, blue and green, which together combine to produce a gloriously rich white.
What's great about this show is the ability to see a lot of Flavin's work in one place, over his entire career. The installation in Beacon is beautiful, but limited; here, you can get a much better idea of what a first-rate colourist Flavin was. The range of things he could achieve with stock lamps is astonishing: by facing some towards the viewer and some back towards the wall, he could fill different parts of the room, especially if the piece was in a corner, with an astonishing array of colours and textures.
And at the end of the exhibition is a room of Flavin's works on paper, which I had never seen before, many of which are very beautiful indeed. It's ironic, though: the studies for light works are gorgeous, while the pieces which are meant to be more self-contained are of little more than art-historical interest.
Still, the room of drawings is a very weak way to end an exhibition with such hard-hitting pieces. Most people, I wager, will go back to the corridor works, or some of the other large-scale virtuoso installations, for their final impression of Flavin. I retraced my steps, doing the whole show backwards, and noticed that the few works marked "exhibition copy" seemed brighter and cleaner – and not necessarily in a good way – than the other pieces in the show. Even after skimming through the exhibition catalogue, I'm none the wiser: is this because flourescent lamps have changed since Flavin started using them, or is it because older lamps fade over time? In other words, which is closer to the art as Flavin created it: the old work or the new? Can anybody help me out on this?
Posted by Felix at 18:50 EST | Comments (1)
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